Sara Rollins
  • February 25, 2026

  • Sara Brock Rollins ’83, MBA ’84 mentors the next generation through LeadHER

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Mentoring young professionals in commercial real estate for more than 25 years has given Sara Brock Rollins plenty of career advice to offer. After retiring as senior managing director of the Financial Consulting Group at CBRE, the double alumna of the UC Irvine School of Social Sciences and the Merage School of Business is focused on sharing her hard-earned expertise with the next generation of UC Irvine students.

Rollins is using her newfound spare time to mentor students through LeadHER, a career development and leadership program offered by the School of Social Sciences with support from the Women of the Dean’s Leadership Society.

“I love seeing young faces eager to learn,” Rollins says. “Many of these young women are the first in their family to graduate from college, and they might not know exactly what they want to do yet. But through LeadHER, they can learn from all these other mentors about the whole gamut of opportunities available to them.”

Giving to UC Irvine feels important to Rollins because of the pivotal role the university played in her own life.

“I would not be who I am today, if I had not gone to UC Irvine and the School of Social Sciences, which then gave me the opportunity to go to graduate school and pursue a career I loved,” Rollins says. “Everything has fit together like puzzle pieces since then.”

Roadmap to business

A quintessential “California girl,” Rollins grew up in Los Angeles and Newport Beach. In a family that valued education, it wasn’t a question of if but where she would go to college. Her older sister chose UC Irvine and Rollins toured campus during Celebrate UCI, visiting cadavers in the medical building and enjoying the Renaissance festival known as Wayzgoose.

“It was a young school and everything was new,” Rollins remembers. “Once you went outside the circle, it was all trees and fields and horses, with cowboys driving by in pickup trucks.”

But what cemented her interest in UC Irvine was a program that, at the time, would allow her to complete her undergraduate degree and earn an MBA in just five years. With a knack for numbers, Rollins knew she wanted to go into business, and never wavered from that. In 1979, Rollins came to UC Irvine, taking courses with such esteemed faculty as Julius Margolis and Robert Newcomb, and majoring in social sciences.

“In the School of Social Sciences, I had this luxury of picking classes that gave me this entire breadth of knowledge – economics, statistics, psychology, political science,” Rollins says. “Through that, I gained the tools and constructed a roadmap for how to do whatever I excelled in – even if I didn’t know quite yet that it would be finance.” 

It wasn’t only academics that kept Rollins busy. Highlights of her Anteater experience included seeing up-and-coming rock bands perform in Crawford Hall and watching men’s basketball games led by future NBA draft pick Kevin McGee.

Career growth and mentorship

Rollins earned her bachelor’s in 1983, and as she was working toward her MBA in 1984, she began looking at the local job market. At a UC Irvine career fair, she met a recruiter from the McDonnell Douglas Finance Company, a subsidiary of the aerospace giant. Rollins spent over a decade working on real estate and aircraft financing, until the company was acquired by Boeing in the late 1990s.

Rollins then transitioned to the Orange County offices of CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate and investment firm. There, for the next 26 years, she led the company’s Financial Consulting Group, directing a team responsible for analyzing data to quantify the value of commercial real estate properties.

“It may not sound glamorous, but at the end of the day, our work was the most important part of real estate decisions,” Rollins says.

With her wealth of experience, Rollins was involved in more than just finance. She was responsible for interviewing and hiring new team members, often recent college graduates, and then mentoring them on the invisible rules and hierarchies of the business world.

CBRE’s Women’s Network recognized her steadfast commitment to mentoring young professionals with the Women’s Network Mentorship Award in 2017 and later the prestigious Endurance of Spirit Award.

Mentoring a new generation of leaders

Since retiring from CBRE in 2024, Rollins gives more time and philanthropy to educational causes such as a program at the high school where her sons graduated that helps students understand their college options. Having hired many staff members during her career, Rollins firmly believes that a college degree proves mastery of essential employability skills: the capacity to juggle conflicting deadlines, time management and the ability to deal with all kinds of people.

“There’s a certain stick-to-it-iveness required to get through college that’s important to success, even if you never use your specific major in your job,” Rollins says.

Through the Dean’s Leadership Society and the Women of the Dean’s Leadership Society, Rollins continues growing her network and finding new ways to help support success for the next generation of leaders.

“The Dean’s Leadership Society is a great way for me to make new connections, especially now that I’m retired,” she says. “I enjoy opportunities to engage with people who work outside real estate – and everyone I meet through DLS is dynamic and interesting.”

Rollins works alongside many of those dynamic women as a mentor in the LeadHER program, continuing her long career coaching and mentoring others.

“Sara is fabulous – so committed to the success of the program and the readiness of our student leaders. Invested in the vision, Sara has visited the LeadHER class throughout the quarter, sharing insights to effective interviews, giving tips on how to develop strong resumes, and other professionals recommendations,” says Jeanett Castellanos, social sciences associate dean of undergraduate studies and LeadHER academic instructor. “I am so grateful for her time and expertise. She tunes in intentionally when the mentees are sharing their professional goals and helps them make connections while offering guidance and resources.”

When coaching young people, Rollins urges them to follow the Japanese concept of ikigai: seek out the intersection of what the world needs, what they’re good at, what they love doing, and that they can get paid for – a sweet spot she feels lucky to have found early in her career.

Today, Rollins’ impact reaches far beyond her own industry. Through LeadHER and her support for educational programs, she’s helping young people discover their strengths and prepare for their future.

“One benefit of higher education is that it eliminates certain struggles and hurdles down the road. In short, it makes life a little easier,” Rollins says. “I want everyone to be successful.”

-Christine Byrd for the UCI School of Social Sciences
-photo by Luis Fonseca, UCI School of Social Sciences

 

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